Video of the day: U.S. forces in Afghanistan attack anti-China militants

KABUL
(Reuters) - U.S. forces in Afghanistan have attacked networks of
anti-China militants in action likely to please Beijing which had called
for Western cooperation in its fight against the group it says wants to
split off its Xinjiang region.

The strikes in northern
Afghanistan’s Badakhshan province destroyed Taliban training camps which
support militant operations in Afghanistan as well as operations by the
East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) in the border region with China
and Tajikistan, Afghanistan’s NATO-led mission said in a release on
Thursday.

“The U.S. strikes in support Afghanistan in reassuring
its neighbors that it is not a safe sanctuary for terrorists who want to
carry out cross-border operations,” it said.

The force gave no
more details about the attacks or any estimate of casualties but it said
the ETIM was behind attacks both inside and outside China and two of
its members had been involved in a 2002 plot to bomb the U.S. Embassy in
Kyrgyzstan.

“They pose a threat to China and enjoy support from the Taliban in Badakhshan and throughout the border region,” the force said.

The
group is drawn from members of China’s Uighur minority, a mostly Muslim
Turkic-speaking people who inhabit the Xinjiang region in China’s far
west.

China has long been concerned that instability in Afghanistan could spill over into Xinjiang.

Hundreds
of people have been killed in violence in recent years in Xinjiang.
Beijing blames the bloodshed on Islamist militants and separatists,
though rights groups say the unrest is more a reaction to repressive
Chinese policies.

The United States, Britain and the United Nations have listed the ETIM as a terrorist group.

China is building an Army base, not manning one, for the Afghan armed forces

Report: China Building Military Base on Afghan-Tajik BorderA
Chinese truck stop in Murghab, near Tajikistan's border with
Afghanistan and China. China is reportedly building a new military base
in Afghanistan, in which case this road could see more Chinese military
traffic. (photo: The Bug Pit)

China is building a military base
for the Afghan armed forces in the province of Badakhshan, a senior
Afghan military official has said. The plan, if it is realized, promises
a deeper Chinese military involvement in Tajikistan, which is necessary
as a supply corridor to Badakhshan.

The plans for the new base
were worked out during a visit last month by an Afghan defense
delegation to Beijing, the official, General Dawlat Waziri, told the
news site Fergana News.

At that meeting, the two sides announced
their intention to “deepen pragmatic cooperation in various fields
including anti-terrorism operations, and push forward the state and
military relations between the two countries.”

This is the latest move in Beijing's steadily increasing involvement in security issues on its western border.

"China
worries that Chinese Uighurs among the terrorists' ranks can cross into
Chinese territory through Afghanistan and become a headache for the
Chinese authorities," one Afghan security official told Fergana on
condition of anonymity.

For Central Asia, this has important
implications because Tajijkistan appears to be an integral part of
Chinese-Afghan military cooperation. Badakhshan shares a short
(76-kilometer) border with China, but in a region impassable by
vehicles.

Badakhshan is most easily reached from China via
Tajikistan's Pamir region, and some media have reported that Chinese
military vehicles were using Tajikistan territory to transit to
Badakhshan for military patrols. (A western diplomat in Central Asia has
told The Bug Pit that those reports were credible.)

China,
Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Pakistan (which also borders Badakhstan)
are all members of a new Beijing-led security grouping, the
Quadrilateral Cooperation and Coordination Mechanism, rolled out in
2016, to Russia's consternation. Also in 2016, China and Tajikistan held
their first-ever joint bilateral military exercises in the part of
Tajikistan bordering on Badakhshan.

A Chinese official, speaking
on condition of anonymity, told Kabul-based analyst Franz J. Marty a
year ago that the Chinese patrols inside Afghanistan had ended in late
2016.

It's not clear whether those patrols were ever restarted,
but this base, if realized, would seem to portend much heavier traffic
in the future.

The Fergana report said, citing an unnamed source
in the Afghanistan Defense Ministry, that work has already begun on the
base's planning. A special commission has been created to work out the
base's location and other technical details, and a delegation of Chinese
military experts were going to be visiting Afghanistan in the coming
days to work on that, Fergana reported.

Monday, December 14, 2009

Wakhan Corridor -- China's back door to Afghanistan

Back in June 2009, China mulled the request to open the Wakhan Corridor
to serve as an alternative supply route to help forces battling the
Taliban. At the same time, the latest Google Earth images show this
new road, supply depots, and constructed guard posts. This corridor
has been closed for over 100 years and was considered inaccessible as
recent as 2007. The decision to now open the corridor is no longer a
logistical issue.

Here is the link to my previous blog entry regarding the Wakhan Corridor

There
was speculation that China would play a “more active role” in
supporting NATO's attempt to pacify Afghanistan, especially after
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said that Chinese forces could join
the military coalition in Afghanistan during a speech to Council on
Foreign Relations (here)

It
was followed shortly by NATO’s statement that we “may ask China to
provide support for the war effort in Afghanistan, including possibly
opening a supply link for alliance forces” (here)
However, those two diplomatic overtures met with the standard Chinese
government statement of “placing the decision under consideration” and
in June 2008, Afghanistan's foreign minister, Rangin Dadfar Spanta,
joined the call for China to open the Wakhan Corridor to be used as a
supply route for NATO’s ongoing operation. (here)

Since
I blogged “Will China play a more 'direct' role in both Pakistan and
Afghanistan conflicts," there were no major developments as China seemed
to follow its foreign policy doctrine of "noninterference in others
internal affairs" strictly. Recently, the Chinese media has started to
focus on the developments in Central Asia. Perhaps it is due to the
recent Xinjing riot as both the Global Times (here) and the PLA Daily (here)
wrote articles about the Wakhan Corridor to generate interest in that
region. Today, photos of PAP (People's Armed Police) personnel
training Afghan police surfaced on Chinese internet (as opposed to the
"other" internet). Oddly enough, there is nothing in the media that has
covered this important shift.